Each afternoon, 30 mammoth hunks of Sy Ginsberg–brand pickled beef brisket are boiled, then lined up for slicing in Bread Basket Deli kitchens across metro Detroit. For those who don’t toil in the cured-meat trade, the 12-pound pink and tan slabs filling up the kitchens are an impressive sight. Bread Basket owner Al Winkler burns through a lot of brisket—around 24,000 pounds weekly, which he says is more than any one restaurant in the nation.
Much of that corned beef will be piled into nine-ounce stacks and set between two pieces of rye or buried in an onion roll. But the scraps and shavings that aren’t pretty enough for a sandwich find a different home—the corned beef egg roll, which is exactly what it sounds like: cured meat bundled up in an egg roll wrapper and deep-fried.
Folding what was once considered waste into those wrappers represents what Winkler calls “found money.” But, five years after he wrapped his first egg rolls, shavings alone can’t meet the growing demand, and he’s stocking up on more 12-pound slabs of brisket to keep up.
